Page 33 - Fujifilm Exposure_41 Happy-Go-Lucky_ok

IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE
Capturing on screen the extraordinary story of The Diving Bell And The Butterfly
over there
Based on his own acclaimed memoir of the same name, The Diving Bell And The Butterfly tells the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor of Elle magazine, after he suffered a paralyzing
stroke. Bauby (Mathieu Almaric) also suffered from “locked-in syndrome” which meant he was alive and con- scious but unable to communicate with the outside world.
That is, until with the help of a speech therapist (Marie Josée Croze) they somehow devised an unorthodox method of communication by which they arrange the alphabet in the order of most frequently used letters and he chose them by blinking.
By this method, word by word, blink by blink, he dictated Le Scaphandre Et Le Papillon (akaThe Diving Bell And The Butterfly), which was published in 1997, shortly before he died.
But how could it be filmed? From a screenplay by Oscar-winning writer Ronald Harwood, it’s directed by the New York filmmaker and painter Julian Schnabel, who had made two previous films about artists creating in the face of determined obstacles - Basquiat and Before Night Falls.
His solution, arrived at with screenwriter Ronald Harwood, was not to show merely the man in the bed but to show what he sees, and those around him, and his memories and fantasies. For Harwood, the camera was, at first, Bauby’s eye.
The film clearly called for unusual visual treatment. So how did
In filming, I tried to see what looking at the world through one eye would be like; you notice subtle things like a cur- tain move or the colour of
light. We used special filters and lenses to create the effect of things going in and out of focus, and smeared Vaseline
“on the lens to get the sense of the eye being dirty or having stuff on it.
We didn’t use any special post-pro- duction technology. I flicked a finger or hand close to the lens to replicate blinking and we manipulated the speed of the camera to create effects too: 24 frames per second is
Schnabel’s collaboration with DP Janusz Kaminski, a previous double Oscar winner for Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List, work?
Said Schnabel: “I tell them what I want, and they think I’m crazy at first. Like I took my glasses off and I put them on the camera. So when you move, it’s in focus and then out of focus. It’s on the camera. For the scene where they sew up his eye, I put latex on the lens and I sewed it up.
“Janusz is a great DP, he’s inspired. The camera operator needed a little bit of pushing. He’s very talented, but he just needed to believe in me. I was asking people to do things they never did before.
“A particular treatment of the image was necessary to sublimate the
interior life. I used a swing and tilt lens, which means that part of it is out of focus and part of it is in focus. So it made the whole film feel like it had a texture, it had a body, there was a skin to it.
“The whole screen was a skin and that’s how I see painting. I made the room. I made the colour. I build the room curved, the ceiling, and put that piece of fluorescent light in the corner. You can find the whole world in the cor- ner of a room. Or inside of yourself.” ■
The Diving Bell And The Butterly, currently on release in the UK, was predominantly originated on Fujicolor Super F-250T 8552 and Super F-125T 8532
normal, but at different moments we used 6 fps (very fast) and 40 fps (very slow), and we used double exposure to layer images.
- JANUSZ KAMINSKI
”
Photo top: Flashback scene with Mathieu Almaric as Jean-Dominique Bauby and Max von Sydow as his father; abovel-r: DPJanuszKaminskiASC;MarieJoséeCrozeasthespeechtherapistandscenesfromTheDivingBellAndTheButterfly
Fujifilm Motion Picture • The Magazine • Exposure • 31